will seem either that he has failed to
conceive his work as a whole or that he has failed to realize his
conception. Similarly, you will not easily discover a favourite passage;
for if he felt that he had succeeded beyond expectation in one passage,
that some note was sharper and truer than the rest, he would set himself
to key the rest to that note. In art, such a process means incredible
labour and agony; Gertler sweats blood and shows it. He labours
terribly, and his pictures are terribly laboured. He is not artist
enough to paint as a bird sings; he paints as a desperate soldier might
dig himself in.

What he has to express is not, it must be confessed, of the highest
quality, because his reactions are limited and rather undistinguished.
He has only two or three notes, and they are neither rich nor rare. For
an artist he is unimaginative, and often in their blank simplicity his
conceptions are all but commonplace. In actual expression, too, though a
first-rate craftsman who paints admirably, he lacks sensibility. In his
handwriting--his lines and dashes, smudges and contours, that is to
say--there is neither charm nor temperament. His colours do their work,
saying what they have to say, but are without beauty in themselves or in
their relations. There is something slightly depressing in the unlovely
sincerity of his execution that reminds me rather of Fra Bartolomeo, and
his imaginative limitations might be compared with those of Lesueur. I
am taking a high standard, you perceive. And any one who cannot respond
to the conviction and conscience with which he not only excludes
whatever is irrelevant or fortuitous or false, but does positively
realize his conceptions is, in my judgment, incapable of appreciating
visual art.

No art could be more different from the art of Gertler than that of
Duncan Grant. For him it seems impossible to scrabble a line or wipe his
brush on a bit of paper without giving delight. As the saying goes, he
is all over an artist. Men endowed with this prodigious sensibility,
facility, and sense of beauty are not uncommon in England. In my time
there have been four--Conder, Steer, John, and Duncan Grant. The danger
is, of course, that they will fall into a trick of flicking off bits of
empty prettiness to the huge contentment of a public that cannot bear
artists to develop or be serious. But Duncan Grant shows no bad
symptoms: from his early picture _Lemon Gatherers_ (No. 35) (justly and
alm